Recently, contact centers have begun employing the use of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions to reduce the costs associated with desktop phones, systems, and equipment. In addition to the equipment cost, traditional phone systems require a multitude of physical and organizational structures and facilities to maintain operations. These structures and facilities can require constant maintenance and support. In general, VDI solutions provide virtualized desktop operating systems and applications to reduce costs, simplify deployment, and enhance support and manageability for end users and administrators. VDI can provide the virtual desktop to a low-cost virtual desktop device while providing the processing power of the desktop in the network. Additionally, VDI also provides other benefits including security of information and backup services.
In today's environment, the virtual desktop may include a variety of media services, such as voice communications, video communications, text communications, and more. Communications for these media services can be provided via the VDI desktop. As can be appreciated, contact center servers may have difficulty in supporting real-time communications through VDI. In general, VDI environments are not architected to easily support bi-directional real time streaming communications. Moreover, if connectivity to a contact center is lost while providing media communications through contact center supported VDI, those communications would be lost along with the connection.
Enabling unified communications through specialized software for VDI desktops can eliminate the desktop phone and provide users with advanced communications capabilities. One example of this specialized software is Avaya's VDI Communicator. The specialized software may be deployed on a thin client device. A thin client device is the end user's equipment that is used to provide plug-in ports for a monitor, keyboard, mouse, headset, and connectivity to a network. The specialized software allows the separation of media traffic from signaling traffic such that media traffic no longer flows through the contact center servers. As such, if connectivity to the contact center server is lost, the media traffic is not. This feature of the specialized software allows end users to continue to make and receive calls even during server connectivity failures.
In the specialized software case provided above, two soft clients are involved in implementing the VDI solution. For instance, one soft client may be run within the VDI host environment (e.g., contact center server, remote server, etc.) to perform the signaling functionality. This soft client is called the VDI Host client, and provides the GUI interface for the softphone. The other soft client is run natively on the end user's device (e.g., computer, etc.) to perform the media functionality, and is called the VDI Media client, since it handles capturing and rendering the media streams to and from I/O devices, but does not generally display the GUI components associated with a full softphone client. To provide unified communications via the specialized software the two soft clients need to be bound together. In some cases, where the operating system and the VDI environment belong to the same developer, binding the two soft clients can be achieved via use of a developer proprietary communications protocol and information exchange. However, where the operating system and the VDI environment are owned by different developers a user must login to each soft client individually to essentially bind the two soft clients.